Want to view your plant's operations? Surf your Internet

InTech, Oct 1997 by Strothman, Jim

In the eyes of industry visionaries, Internet/intranet technology-in combination with Windows NT, the PC platform, and object-based software-is destined to bring monumental changes to control systems architecture.

"Supervision of plant-floor data presented in Web pages is emerging as the easiest, quickest, and lowest-cost approach to monitoring your plant floor," said Rockwell Software president Scott Zifferer. "Recent research. . . has demonstrated that today's Internet would require only a 10 to 20 times improvement in access times and reduced variability in order to duplicate the kind of regulatory loop control that our customers typically do today. This exciting news has raised the activity level at Honeywell significantly," said Elliott Rachlin, a Honeywell Engineering Fellow. "However, most users will not want to actually run a plant remotely via the Internet.... Security implications are too serious," cautioned Wonderware CEO Roy Slavin.

Control Platforms invited these and other experts from several leading-edge control systems hardware and software suppliers to gaze into their crystal balls and respond to the question:

What impact do you believe Internet and intranet communications technology will have on control systems design now and in the foreseeable future?

Here are their views:

ANDY CHATHA, PRESIDENT, AUTOMATION RESEARCH CORP., DEDHAM, MASS.

Internet and intranet technology will help you achieve your ultimate goal: unify your entire enterprise, including all of your plant equipment down to the sensors and actuators.

I am sure you enjoy surfing the Web from time to time. In our view, surfing your plant intranet should be no different. With the right password, you should be able to look at how your plant is performing from your office, home, or anywhere around the world. Web browsers will become the dominant operator interface (OI) for viewing information about all plant operations.

Another big advantage of Internet technology is the fact that they are platform independent. You can run them on a workstation, PC, networked computer, or your handheld personal assistant Now you don't have to spend thousands of dollars to develop custom interfaces between different systems in your plants. Just ask each supplier to publish the information you need on a Web server. Then anyone can access this information through a browser.

With plant intranets in place, all your field devices become Web servers. Each device publishes the latest information and anyone can access it whenever they need it. When you need a piece of information, you access it directly from the device that is generating it, not from an old database.

With Internet and intranet technology, all of your employees can work in real time, not just your plants. You will have the latest information about your plants, orders, and customers at your fingertips. The information or up-tothe-minute intelligence will become your new competitive advantage.

ROY SLAVIN, PRESIDENT AND CEO. WONDERWARE CORP., IRVINE, CALIF.

Internet and intranet communications technology will change the user's ability to gather or view corporate information and production data from any place in the world or within a corporate network. Using standard, nonproprietary technologies means that front ends can be developed easily for any plant automation application, and they can be accessed using open communications standards such as TCP/IP and Ethernet.

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) runs on top of TCP/IP so no proprietary network is required. Using these standard tools also means that bandwidths and performance will increase in the future as network technology providers improve and enhance their product offerings.

For industrial users, this means virtually unlimited capabilities not only to gather data remotely but to handle tasks such as remote diagnostics and maintenance without worrying about local modem configuration and control. Since Internet/intranet technology is nonproprietary, applications can simply be loaded on-the-fly using a dataless browser. The browser front end gives users a broad variety of ways to manipulate OI screens and data for remote viewing or even for automatic transfer into a database. However, most users will not want to actually run a plant remotely via the Internet, but will prefer to manage plant operations locally and simply provide a remote access capability to the real-time data being generated or gathered at the site. Security implications are too serious; no one would want to have multiple people attempting to reset set points for the same application. It will be a long time before people consider remote control of applications, if ever.

BOB MOORE, PRESIDENT, GENSYM CORP., CAMBRIDGE. MASS.

We are already seeing some impact of intranet communications. The most common use is to allow client access to a system from a remote site.

For example, some of the systems built on Gensym's software are using "expert" knowledge to detect problems earlier and diagnose the causes. The diagnostic systems can make beeper calls to the appropriate personnel for the problem detected, and the intranet with a Web browser allows access to information about the fault from any remote site on the Web, such as from home at night.